business Mr. Faber and Ms. Patrick had brought to it, Mr. Bender said. Of course, with the gentleman’s connections to the institution a great degree of trust came into play, mutual trust he hoped he could say, and excellent customers such as Ms. Patrick, soon to be wed to the son of a sort of “silent partner” at the inception of that institution, could be granted a degree of latitude not permitted the general public. With that said, and Mr. Bender wished most heartily that his concerns should not be taken amiss, it would be less than perfectly responsible if the chief officer of a banking institution did not seek independent verification of financial arrangements said to be established between account-holding couples. For example. Let us say a significant sum of money has been transferred between accounts, and agreements exist to establish similar transfers of funds at regular intervals, said agreement to have been signed right on Mr. Bender’s desk here by one of the parties, then taken away by that party for the secondary signature to be affixed at a separate location. In such a case, Mr. Bender trusted that the question of verification would be seen as a simple formality entered into for the purpose of dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.
And with that verbal flourish, the nervous Mr. Bender withdrew from a file on his desk an agreement that transferred an immediate $200,000 from various of Willy’s shiny new accounts into Mitchell’s savings account, and thereafter moved half that amount from hers to his on the first of each month for the next eight months. This document bore two signatures, Mitchell’s and one that came pretty close to Willy’s hasty scribble.
“I don’t believe it,” Tom said.
“He forged my signature on a document that moved one million dollars from my accounts into his over the next eight months.”
“I mean, I do believe it, but it’s incredible. How did he explain it to the banker?”
“He told him that I was nervous about investing money, and wanted him to do it for me. He said after we were married, we were going to have joint accounts anyhow.”
“Were you?”
“Do you think Mitchell ever discussed finances with me? It was taken for granted that he had tons of money. He certainly acted like a rich man—he bought me a Mercedes! With my money, it looks like. I guess I bought his Mercedes, too.”
“Willy, how much money do you have in that crappy little bank, anyhow?”
“Around three million,” she said. “Most of it was from Jim’s estate. If Baltic paid that kind of money to Jim, I thought Mitchell would earn pretty much the same thing.”
“Mitchell must be a long way down the totem pole. What did the banker do when you told him your signature was forged?”
“I thought he was going to commit hari-kari. You know the funny thing? He always knew there was something fishy about that agreement. He was afraid of Mitchell. Mitchell intimidated him. I bet Mitchell intimidated everyone in Hendersonia. And the arrangement didn’t take any money away from his bank, it just moved it around a little, so he didn’t ask any questions. He apologized for about half an hour and begged me to let him make things right.”
Tom laughed. “He’s been ‘making things right’ all afternoon. I bet his shredder’s seen a lot of use.”
Willy drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. To Tom, in the low light of the bedside lamp, she looked, at first, only a few years older than the mysterious girl he had met in 1985; then he saw the fine lines around her mouth and the faint tracery under her eyes and, although he had never before thought of her in these terms, that she was one of the most distinguished women he knew.
“And of course another way he could make things right was to grease the wheels for your withdrawal. How much money did you walk out with?”
“A hundred thousand.”
“Jesus Christ.” He half-rose from the chair and looked at the floor on the other side of the bed, then at the closet door.
“It’s in the closet. I didn’t know where else to put it. A thousand hundred-dollar bills makes a pretty big stack.”
“I’ve never been in a room with that much money before.”
“Mr. Bender told me I could come back tomorrow and get another hundred thousand, but I don’t think I should do that.”
“No,” Tom said. “What did you do after you left the